Head of Talent and People

Sardine is the leading agentic risk platform for fighting financial crime. Our integrated solution unifies data across risk teams to help organizations stop fraud in real time, prevent AI-driven attacks, and automate fraud and AML operations. Sardine’s platform is strengthened by one of the fastest-growing fraud consortiums in the market, spanning more than 6 billion profiled devices, 800 million consumers, and 3 million businesses worldwide. Leading companies including FIS, GoDaddy, Intuit, Edward Jones, ZoomInfo, and Checkout.com rely on Sardine to secure and grow trust in their products.

• We have hubs in the Bay Area, NYC, Austin, Toronto, and São Paulo. However, we maintain a remote-first work culture. #WorkFromAnywhere

• We hire talented, self-motivated individuals with extreme ownership and high growth orientation.

• We value performance and not hours worked. We believe you shouldn't have to miss your family dinner, your kid's school play, friends get-together, or doctor's appointments for the sake of adhering to an arbitrary work schedule.

Sardine is looking for a Head of Talent & People to lead and grow our global team. This is a hands-on, player-coach role - you'll set direction and manage a full team of practitioners, while still staying close enough to the work to source a hard-to-fill candidate yourself, sit in on a tough employee relations conversation, or dig into a comp band directly. You'll own Talent, People Ops, and HR Business Partnering end-to-end, with a mandate to build pragmatic systems that scale with a fast-growing startup.

Team Leadership

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  Lead and manage a team of Recruiters, People Ops/HR professionals, including any team leads within those functions

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  Set goals, priorities, and capacity plans across Recruitment and People Ops/HR

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  Coach, develop, and performance-manage team; build a bench of future team leads as the org grows

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  Own headcount planning across the organization

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  Create the operating rhythm for the team (standups, pipeline reviews, OKRs, hiring sprints) without over-processizing a still-scrappy function

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  Model the player-coach standard you expect from the team - jump into the work alongside them

Talent Acquisition (the largest part of the job. This role is Talent-heavy)

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  Build and continuously improve our hiring process: interview loops, scorecards, calibration, and candidate experience

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  Partner directly with the CEO and Exec team on leadership hires. Own full-cycle recruiting for key leadership roles, including sourcing, screening, and closing candidates yourself

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  Build scalable sourcing channels and employer branding so Sardine competes for top talent without over-relying on agencies

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  Track and report on hiring metrics (pipeline health, time-to-fill, offer acceptance) and adjust strategy accordingly

People Operations

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  Oversee the People Ops Lead and team who own the employee lifecycle (onboarding, offboarding, HRIS administration, benefits administration, and compliance) - ensure the function runs smoothly and scales with rest of the company

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  Manage and scale our existing performance review, compensation banding, leveling, and promotion cycle infrastructure - this is already built and robust; your job is to run it well, refine it as we grow, and make sure it stays credible with employees and managers

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  Ensure compliance with employment law across jurisdictions where Sardine has employees, in partnership with your People Ops team

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  Provide oversight and escalation support on vendor relationships (benefits brokers, payroll providers) that the People Ops Lead manages day to day

HR Business Partnering

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  Act as a trusted advisor to managers and the leadership team on org design, team structure, performance management, and employee relations

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  Partner with leaders as an internal leadership coach

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  Handle employee relations issues with sound judgment, discretion, and fairness

• 12+ years in talent/recruiting and people roles, with real depth in talent

• Experience running people function at fast-paced, high-growth tech startups

• Proven experience managing a strong Talent and People team, ideally spanning both Recruitment and People Ops/HR - you know how to set direction, hold people accountable, and develop managers

• Generalist range: you're equally credible talking about an offer negotiation, a comp band, a difficult employee relations issue, or a performance management

• A player-coach mindset - you want to do the work, not just direct it

• Excellent judgment and discretion; you build trust quickly with founders, execs, and employees at every level

• Strong operating instincts: you build lightweight, scalable systems rather than heavy process

• Based in the Bay Area, with the ability to work from our Berkeley office at least 2 days every week